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Twelve
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Twelve S he could not be cheetful at the furewell party Samad and Abdullah gave for Chester. Henry had forgotten about Professor Forster's warnings when he heard Chester was leaving. Besides, Li An was constantly with Auntie, while Chester was spending his last few weeks in Malaysia traveling around the country and seeing as much of it as he could. He went up to Kedah to stay with Samad's family in their village, and to lohore, where Abdullah's father was a retired civil servant. He took off with some Peace Corps friends to the Penang beaches, and spent a day in Malacca among the ruins of Portuguese and Dutch fortresses and tombs. At the party he described a revelation he had under a flameof -the-forest tree in Malacca, by the fifteenth-century Portuguese gatehouse, the A Famosa. "Looking up at those crimson flowers-you know how beautiful they are, with long tassels and so bright against the blue sky-I thought how futile the Portuguese were in coming to Malacca. What I have learned this year is that white people have no place in the East. The East is like the flameof -the-forest. It's going to remain beautiful no matter what happens. But everything the Portuguese did, their cannons and forts and churches, it's all dead history, out of place ..." "Stoned out of your mind!" Robert interrupted. Robert had been Chester's traveling companion. He was JOSS and GOLD staying for the second year in Malaysia, and he was enjoying the pathos of good-byes surrounding Chester's departure. "Would you believe it? First time he's been stoned. What a sight! He's lying under this tree, looking at the flowers as they're falling down, and mumbling. Hey, real Cheng Mai Gold!" Ellen snorted. "What gold? You Americans are a terrible influence. Marijuana, Rand R, Vietnam GIs. Suddenly got prostitutes everywhere. Where Malaysia like this before?" Everyone looked uncomfortable. The room was full of different people who didn't know each other: Peace Corps Americans with slim Malay and Chinese girls, Malay journalists and broadcast staffers from Samad's and Abdullah's offices, Indian and Chinese teachers from the Vocational High School, friends Chester had made at Malay classes at the university. He seemed to know everyone. Paroo was somewhere in the crowd. He had tried talking to Li An, but the noise was too loud and the bodies pressing on them pushed them apart. Above the confusion Ellen's question was heard by many. She had been drinking but her speech wasn't slurred. "You're right." Chester was as relaxed as Ellen was sharp. "That's why I'm getting out. Americans don't belong here. We're hurting the place. Like Malacca. It was just an old fishing village until those gunboats came along." "No, it was never just an old fishing village," Robert interrupted, laughing. "Isabella Bird called the country 'The Golden Chersonese,' way before there was Cheng Mai Gold. That's the fancy Victorian way of saying 'peninsula,' get it? She was on to something. Chester's problem," he added, addressing the circle around them, "is he'd rather be in America. He can't see himself here, even stoned." Li An hated Chester then. She had visited Malacca with Henry months before she met Chester, and had loved its ruins and air of melancholic decay. Even its rundown shadows breathed of adventures and encounters, and she had pointed out to Henry these possibilities in the moldering colonial, Chinese, and Malay structures that crowded the town. History, she insisted, was living in Malacca, visible in the gorgeous Eurasian children and the Latin mass they heard that 90 [3.236.214.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:43 GMT) CROSSING Sunday at St. Francis Church. The tropical breezes from the Straits blew reminders of generations of strangers and exiles from distant places. The rustle in the heavy leaves of the sea almond trees on St. Paul's Hill, by the roofless church and sagging stone walls, carried stories that Li An could still imagine , stories written in the Latin script on the sarcophagi rising from the lallang-covered hillsides, the Chinese calligraphy carved above the ornate doors of merchants' homes, and the cursive Jawi lettering proliferating by the Malay mosques. Listening to the laughter that followed, she was glad Chester was leaving. How could she have thought she loved him, she wondered, when he was so...